Lowell Community Health Center's new home honors benefactor's legacy

LOWELL -- Theodore Edson Parker has received a lot of well-deserved credit for his charitable contributions to Lowell.

It's time his Uncle Moses gets some glory, too.

"Lowell has so many extraordinary historical figures, they sort of all get lost in the shuffle," said Newell Flather, president of the Theodore Edson Parker Foundation.

The Lowell Community Health Center announced Thursday that it will name its new home the Dr. Moses Greeley Parker Building. Dr. Parker was the uncle and benefactor to Theodore Edson Parker, whose philanthropic foundation gave $1 million to LCHC's $5 million capital campaign.

"The Parker Foundation represents our largest gift, and the trustees wanted to name the building after (Dr. Parker) because he was a physician who still means a lot to this community," said Dorcas Grigg-Saito, president of LCHC.

The money will be used to help pay for LCHC's $42 million renovation of the Hamilton Manufacturing Co. mill complex on Jackson Street, which opened in December. LCHC provides outpatient care to 50,000 Greater Lowell residents a year, regardless of financial or insurance status.

Moses Greeley Parker was a successful physician in his hometown of Dracut during the mid-to-late 19th century. But his interest in invention and entrepreneurship brought him his real fortune.

"He was unusual in that he had a curiosity of the gimmicks being invented in the late 1800s," said Flather.

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"My impression is that whenever there was something new, he went out of his way to take a look at it."

In 1877, Parker attended a demonstration in Lowell of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, which had been patented less than a year earlier. He immediately recognized the potential of the device and invested heavily in the American Telephone Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Parker quickly amassed a large fortune and donated portions of it to charitable causes in Dracut and Lowell. He died in 1917, upon which time his estate passed to his nephew Theodore. The Parker Foundation was established in 1944, five years after Theodore died, and it has continued to provide support to nonprofit charitable organizations in Lowell to this day.

The Parker Foundation had pledged three separate $100,000 challenge grants to LCHC over the course of the fundraising process. LCHC was $1.5 million away from its $5 million goal two months before its Jan. 31 deadline, so it asked the Parker Foundation for another $200,000. Lucky for the LCHC, the Parker Foundation felt even more generous that day.

"At our December meeting, an anonymous donor from Lowell basically told us, 'Come on, get with it' and said he or she would donate an additional $100,000 if we did $700,000 more," said Flather. "To us, the Health Center has always seemed like such an important organization in terms of who it serves and it's important to the neighborhood, so it felt like a good opportunity."

"It's unusual for individuals or foundations to give more than you ask for," said Maura Smith, director of development and community relations at LCHC. "It speaks to how much our organizations align and how we're such a perfect fit for one another."

The Dr. Moses Greeley Parker Building will be officially unveiled at a ceremony this morning.

"This is definitely one of our most exciting grants," said Flather. "It made sense since it's a health center and (Moses) was a doctor and hasn't has as much visibility (as Theodore). In our world, they were both important."

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